This five-day showcase of some of the most cutting edge work in immersive storytelling and new media, kickstarted in Mumbai this week.

The world of immersive content has opened up over the past couple of decades—expanding, even as the technology is itself in its nascent stages, to include fields as diverse as art and design, gaming, education and social welfare.

While the country is going through its own art and design renaissance, with a resurgence of uniquely Indian stories being told through experimental media forms, immersive content could help bridge a gaping hole in the cultural narrative—specifically, whose stories get told, and who gets to tell them.

Immersive Media Virtual Reality “Ashes to Ashes”

At the cutting edge of the new movement in India is UnBox, an interdisciplinary media and design festival launched by New Delhi-based design studio Quicksand. UnBox, which has always worked to bring together entrepreneurs and creators in diverse fields, introduced EyeMyth early on in 2011, as a section of Unbox that explored audio-visual media, especially in the form of film.

VR workshop crossover labs

In February 2016, EyeMyth was hosted independent of UnBox, in collaboration with the Japan Media Art Festival. “We expanded the notion of EyeMyth to also include installation art and exhibitions and showcases of various ideas and projects, plus performances,” explains UnBox founder Avinash Kumar (previously one half of mixed media performance duo BLOT), about the latest edition in Mumbai. “The kind of content in EyeMyth is also very interesting for a city like Mumbai, which also has Bollywood and a big industry of media and film. We can look at media in a newer way and maybe look at the future of all these mediums.”

Immersive VR “Yeh Ballet”

The highlight of this media festival is also the unveiling of Indian Centre of Immersive Media, an initiative by UnBox in collaboration with the Indian School of Design and Innovation (ISDI). The hope is that the centre will serve as a space for collaboration, experimentation and incubation, where students and professionals alike can work together to stake their claim on the immersive media landscape.

The EyeMyth Festival, which will host workshops in Virtual and Augmented Reality on the ISDI campus this year, will serve as an introduction, of sorts, to the kind of work that ICIM hopes to achieve.

In addition to film screenings, audio-visual performances and immersive media showcases, the programme for this year’s festival includes two five-day workshops.

August 16-20: The Augmented Reality Street Art Crew workshop, in partnership with St+Art Foundation, showcases the use of technology as a tool, and introduces participants to the Blippar AR platform. Additionally, the workshop also introduced participants to the Unity + Vuforia plug in and Touchdesigner platforms.

August 18: Among the performances to watch out for is the “Future Fiction” showcase at antiSocial, Khar—a night of film screenings and live AV performance sets, which kicks off at 6pm on August 18.

On August 19 at ISDI, Nick Dwyer, host of the show Diggin’ in the Carts, which explores the world of video game music and Soichi Terrada, who has worked as a composer in the video game industry, will speak at ISDI (5pm, by invite only) and later host a performance at Summer House Café.

August 20: The VR Storyteller’s Guild workshop pushes participants to create complex projects using techniques like photogrammetry, directing for VR and the Unity game engine. Both groups will showcase their work at a conference on August 20.